Sunday, April 13, 2008

This week proved that shows don’t need to be on the air (or even in production) to cause all sorts of drama and fangirl flailing.

First, there’s the awesome news: Lost’s thirteen-episode season will now be a fourteen-episode season, because Lost season finales are so huge that they can’t be smushed into a single hour. Fourteen is no sixteen (which is no twenty-two), but it’s better than thirteen.

The trade-off is that episode twelve will air on May 15th and there will be no Lost at all on May 22nd before we get the two-part finale on May 29th.Still, we’ll take our victories where we can get them. And if you’re a Grey’s Anatomy fan, it’s doubly awesome for you, because moving the Lost finale created a scheduling gap that will be filled by a two-hour Grey’s finale.

Meanwhile, I spent this week reeling from the news that Lifetime has poached ProjectRunway from Bravo. Madness! PR is basically Bravo’s flagship show and the two of them are intrinsically linked in my mind. (I don’t adjust to these kinds of things easily. I can’t even get it through my head that Lost airs on Thursdays now. Hell, a few years ago, all of our local newscasts played musical anchors and I still think that everyone’s on the wrong channel.) When it comes to the Bravo/PR connection, it’s not just in my head. Bravo’s started a mini PR-offshoot franchise, with stuff like Project Jay and Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style.

They claim the move to Lifetime won’t affect the content of the show at all. But… it’ll be weird. If I may be demographically snotty for a minute – Lifetime is all schmaltz and movies-of-the-week. The show doesn’t mesh with their brand the same way it does with Bravo’s yuppie, snarky, gay-friendly deal. Which, of course, is probably the point. PR scores huge ratings for Bravo. Lifetime paid an assload of money in the hopes that it will also score huge ratings for them and maybe get rid of that “schmaltz” label.

The jumping of networks isn’t the only PR news this week: Nina Garcia is no longer working at Elle. Which doesn’t necessarily mean Nina won’t be returning, just that Heidi will have to introduce her as something other than “Nina Garcia, fashion director of Elle magazine.” And that the winner will probably not be doing a spread for the magazine.

And just in case Lifetime hasn’t screwed with my view of the universe enough this week, reruns of The Golden Girls will move from Lifetime to the Hallmark Channel next year. Hallmark? I don’t even know if I get Hallmark! If I do, it’s up there in the crazy-high digits with all the other channels I’ve never watched. Without access to Golden Girls, where will I turn when there’s nothing else on? Not to mention that Golden Girls airs on Lifetime about twenty times a day. Man, what a chunk of programming time Lifetime will have to fill. What are they going to do with all that free time?

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